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UC Berkeley researchers today announced the launch of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, a joint project of faculty, researchers and students that will explore such timely issues as refugee crises, human rights, immigration, nativism and border control concerns.

Scientists at UC Berkeley, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Dartmouth College and Université Paris Descartes have found that blinking does more than lubricate dry eyes and protect them from irritants.

January 18, 2017

In an experiment involving 18 healthy adults aged 18 to 30, researchers found that, when deprived of sleep for 24 hours, subjects struggled to effectively process facial expressions and identified a wider range of expressions as hostile than they had after a normal night’s rest.

January 9, 2017

The astonishing beauty of galaxies visible from Earth has enchanted humanity ever since our ancestors first gazed into the twinkling night and wondrously beheld them. Some galaxies look like elegant whirling spirals or cosmic frisbees, while others look like elliptical blobs or lumpy irregular clumps smeared across the sky. The variety of galactic shapes prompts questions as old as astronomy: why do galaxies form these characteristic shapes? Can elliptical galaxies become spirals, or vice versa?

January 4, 2017

One of the rare and brief bursts of cosmic radio waves that have puzzled astronomers since they were first detected nearly 10 years ago has finally been tied to a source: an older dwarf galaxy more than 3 billion light years from Earth.

December 23, 2016

UC Berkeley scientists have discovered simple CRISPR systems similar to CRISPR-Cas9 — a gene-editing tool that has revolutionized biology — in previously unexplored bacteria that have eluded efforts to grow them in the laboratory.

December 20, 2016

When you’re suddenly able to understand someone despite their thick accent, or finally make out the lyrics of a song, your brain appears to be re-tuning to recognize speech that was previously incomprehensible. UC Berkeley neuroscientists have now observed this re-tuning in action by recording directly from the surface of a person’s brain as the words of a previously unintelligible sentence suddenly pop out after the subject is told the meaning of the garbled speech.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced awards to support UC Berkeley research on American slavery, rehousing of classical artifacts and translating Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs and other scripts.

December 14, 2016

The three-ton lid of the coffin of an ancient Egyptian doctor has been carefully removed from storage and maneuvered into a new resting place at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Berkeley’s worldwide network of smartphone earthquake detectors has recorded nearly 400 earthquakes since the MyShake app was made available for download in February, with one of the most active areas of the world the fracking fields of Oklahoma.

December 13, 2016

Todd Dawson, a professor of integrative biology and environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley has teamed up with Parrot to test the company’s drone-based research tools as a way to monitor the Sierra Nevada’s giant sequoias more intensively, helping him find out how they utilize water and sunlight and predict how they will deal with a warmer Earth and changes in water supply.

December 9, 2016

Erin Ptaschinski copes with stress by plunging from planes into a 180-mph free fall before opening her parachute.

In the last six years, she’s skydived more than 1,800 times, but there’s one jump Ptaschinski, 31, a UC Berkeley adviser for undergraduate psychology majors, will never forget. That is, until she breaks her next world record.